Currently on view at Pith Gallery is Lane Shordee‘s Hello Neighbour, an exhibition featuring sculptures, paintings, video, and handcrafted artifacts. This project sounds really great so be sure to get down to Pith (1018 9th Ave SE) before July 7th to see it.

Clare M. Duckett sent over this excellent article on the project, and on Lane’s practice in general. Following the article is a fun mini-doc Caitlind r.c. Brown made about Lane’s handmade shotgun – on display in the exhibition.

scAVENGER

Lane Shordee is a gentle genius. The unassuming sort who keeps to himself and works
under cover of basement and garage. His capable limbs are waxed with grime and greased
with earth, his hair caulked and caked with a goodly amount of organic filth — matted with
the very material that comprises his practice, his discipline: soot, sawdust, sweat, various
lingering chemical binding agents and VOCs — the sentimental sediment that lingers once
he has foraged for, forged, and encouraged a thing into being. He is creator. He is carpenter.
He is carbon-basted.

This man is a scavenger artist: a DIY dynamo of the surest capacity. He favours his forearm
to the conventional tape measure. His lungs act as terrariums for the same grit and moss that
clog his nail beds: indeed, his hands breathe life into those scrapped beams blessed enough
to be chosen as his apostles. He is building a church. One that espouses Goodwill and
champions the pioneer. Lane Shordee, in short, is a prophet.

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He suits up before going out on one of his retrieval quests, like some nouveau folk-
superhero. His accoutrements, utilitarian: tool belt, backpack (homemade). His sidekicks,
totems: magpie, raccoon (homeboys). “You kind of feel like you’re going into battle and can
take anything on. But I try to keep it low-key. Like, I’ll go after-hours and try to be as
stealthy as possible. Usually, I’ll scope things out and figure out how to get a certain item
home — if I need a friend’s help. If it’s been there for a week, I figure it’s fair game.” He
speaks of this urban hunter-gathering as a sort of rescue mission, though jokes, “I don’t save
anyone except myself”.

He carries on his person a small notebook. It is filled with intricate engineering schematics.
Innovative blueprints in red and black ink, he employs drawing as a means to filter and
explore and acquaint himself with nascent ideas. A breast-pocket incubator. “I need to take
things apart.  Figure out how the thing works. That’s really important to me. Take it apart
and put it back together. Eventually you get pretty good at it. You get to know all the pieces
pretty intimately. You can animate them in your head.”

His bicycle is equipped with a small trailer, a “Particle Accelerator”, to transport his finds
back to his workshop, his garage menagerie. A veritable tinderbox of garbage delights, it
fosters many aging orphans: turnstiles, reticulated foam, tarpaulin, a fire hose, chunks of
gymnasium floor. It is a dumpster diver’s city of dumpster diversity. Wood is the most
prolific disciple of his discipline: a kind of kindred kindling. Piles of disposed lumber, biting
with nails and staples and splinters, are carefully graded and sorted for desirable traits. “It’s
available you know? I consider it a natural resource. To me, it’s my duty. Everything I pick
up, I feel a responsibility to, to use it; every little bit deserves, to me, something more. Yeah.
I feel good about it — I feel like I’m saving it, a little bit. It’s what I can do to help things
out.”

This inheritance of inherent nuance will be reborn as ornaments to grace the homes of a
society who rejected their components. Functional objects borne of abjection. The refuse of building projects, projected, with a new focus, into a new light. He is their Messiah.

“I like the searching, because you never know what you’re going to come across. You go to
the hardware store and you pick out exactly what you need. They either have it or they don’t.
With scavenging, you sort of have to be patient. It’s not immediate, and that’s the joy of it.
Things will show up if you’re constantly looking for them. Sometimes I feel the universe is
good to me in that way. It will provide for me, even when I forget about a certain item. It’ll
give me an idea or a solution for how to make something work. It’s a longer process, but it’s
more interesting to just grab what’s available and go with it and cut it down and shape it and
try to piece it together. I’ll have things sitting around in my studio or workshop and they’ll
work well with these new things I’ve brought in. I don’t fight that; when it’s going good you
shouldn’t deny or second-guess your motions. I try to have a good method. I try to let the
garbage inspire me.”

Lane Shordee is Caractacus Potts. He is Davy Crockett. He is Robert Baden-Powell.
He is Swiss Family Robinson.

His technique is industrial and industrious: a bricolage of clumsy thrift, wrought of rot —
brutal, beautiful, beatified. Reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s Combines, his sculpture, his art
of acting artefacts, illuminates the common trope “One man’s trash is another man’s
treasure”. He is philosopher-anthropologist.

“Hello Neighbour” is his first solo exhibition. It spits of chewing tobacco and boot polish.
After coming across a lone bullet of indeterminate age in his garage [a former carriage-house]
he decided to build a rifle that might be able to fire it. Ammunition with a new mission. The
gun he tailored is rife with semiotic, semi-automatic implications, its stock cut from “No
Trespassing” and “Private Property” signs, the word “Risk” (presumably once accompanied
by the sequence “Enter at your Own”) shocks in all-caps beneath the barrel of reclaimed
pipe-and-tube-bits. He has built a horse-drawn carriage from plank and stave salvaged from
Western Canada High School.  His work subscribes to the school of functional aesthetics.
The gun really fires and the carriage really carriages.  “I’ve had it in mind for a long time. I
just didn’t have the space or the storage to accumulate materials. It’s nice not having to
bypass a really good find.”

As a freelance Alley Custodian, he has had to defend his practice to the authorities on a few
occasions, enter into a custody battle: in effect, martyr himself. “The cops don’t really know
what to do with me; they have their obligation to investigate. All in all, contractors are pretty
understanding, too. It’s no skin off his back if I free up some space in the container he’s
renting. It’s the proprietors, it’s their bosses who get up in arms. Sometimes it’s liability,
sometimes [in the case of store-owners] it’s just that they paid good money for the right to
throw that thing away. They don’t want it getting into the hands of someone who might get
the same use out of it without paying for it. They’ve hexed it. If they can’t have it, no one
can.” The same honest-modest nonchalance governs his artistic approach: “When you go
through the proper channels, you lose a lot in that process. …I’d rather just go ahead and do
it and see what happens. Then improve on that. You have to go through that struggle.”
Where others might be deterred, he is determined.

Shordee is well-seasoned with coarse-grade salt-of-the-earth. A man of waste-not, want-not
ideals and steady temperament, he is more of the depression era than generation X. He is a
dirty-thirty-something with a clean-your-plate mentality. Calm-sturdy, humble-noble, he
illustrates his speech with calloused gesticulation; he is wise and well-worn — he wears it
well. His hands are stained with the royalties of toil: oil, soil. His clothes, choked with chalk.
He is a gypsum gypsy. A trueblood mudlark. He is Ally of the Alley, here to avenge the
leftovers of a prodigal society. It is a sweet convenience that his first name should be
synonymous with his stomping grounds. Take heed.

scAVENGER